# Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane

**Company:** [Crusoe](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/crusoe)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Sunnyvale, CA, Seattle, WA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $215k – $260k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** sdn, ovn/ovs, vxlan, geneve, vpc, BGP, evpn, Go, Kubernetes, ebpf, dpdk, dpu, smartnic, Distributed Systems
**Posted:** 2026-08-06

> Leads a team building and operating a scalable SDN control plane for multi-tenant VPC networking across large GPU fleets. The role combines hands-on distributed-systems architecture, cloud networking expertise, production reliability, and engineering people leadership.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Define the roadmap for the VPC control plane and evolve network virtualization systems such as OVN/OVS.
- Build services that program multi-tenant virtual networks across large-scale GPU fleets, including VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancing, NAT, and internet/hybrid connectivity.
- Design distributed control-plane services for intent APIs, state reconciliation, network policy compilation, and southbound programming of hosts and DPUs.
- Drive scalability, reliability engineering, convergence and API-latency benchmarking, regression prevention, and incident response.
- Support operational excellence within 3–6 month execution cycles.
- Mentor and grow mid-level to senior distributed-systems engineers while setting technical standards and fostering accountability.
- Partner with data-plane and cloud product teams to deliver low-latency, highly available networking for multi-tenant GPU clusters.

## Requirements
- 6–8+ years of experience in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering.
- 2–4+ years of experience managing engineering talent.
- Strong knowledge of SDN and network virtualization, including overlay networking, VPC constructs, routing, and control-plane architectures such as OVN/OVS or equivalent.
- Hands-on experience building large-scale control planes, including state reconciliation, consensus and consistency trade-offs, API design, and fleet-wide configuration propagation.
- Experience with Go, Kubernetes-style controllers, or similar technologies.
- Understanding of operating multi-tenant cloud services, including SLOs, convergence-time and scale benchmarking, graceful degradation, and blast-radius containment.
- Ability to resolve complex technical challenges in a fast-moving, execution-focused environment.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience with DPU- or SmartNIC-programmed data planes.
- Experience with cloud load balancing or NAT at scale.
- Experience with network security policy engines.
- Open-source contributions to OVN/OVS or SDN projects.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Compensation range of **$215,000–$260,000 plus bonus**.
- Restricted Stock Units included in all offers.
- Paid time off, paid holidays, and leave programs.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Employer HSA contributions.
- Paid parental leave.
- Paid life insurance and short- and long-term disability coverage.
- Professional development and tuition reimbursement.
- Mental health and wellness support.
- Commuter benefits, cell phone stipend, and 401(k) plan with company match up to 4% of salary.
- Volunteer time off, global travel insurance, emergency assistance, daily meals allowance, and location-specific perks.

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